Light 03: Candles

By Circe -

Welcome to the 2023 Advent Calendar, which this year is just a list of things that light up all pretty. Previous entries are here. If you enjoy this and want to encourage me to bang more things out on a keyboard, consider supporting my Patreon, or sending something off of my Christmas list. If you'd rather support my spoiled pets, their Ratmas list is here. If you want to spend money but not on me, you can direct your donations to Mainely Rat Rescue, who handles rescue and foster operations for rats, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, and other small mammals in the New England area, or the MSPCA, where my critters got their medical care before I found a good exotics vet, and where I picked up Koda and Yogi. 

Enjoy your trip through the cavalcade of things that go blinky-blink in the dark!

A rat family, gathered around a tea candle.
The earliest candles were an evolution of the small oil lamps, as are used in the Diwali decorations of the previous entry. The Romans were the first to make candles by dipping a burnable fiber wick in hot tallow, letting it cool, and repeating over and over until they had what amounted to a lampless oil reserve that could stand up by itself. Beeswax candles were less animal-scented, but more costly, as the wax was often imported from places like Tunisia, which amounted to the other side of the world at the time. The pure translucent white, slightly crumbly candles we see in the industrialized world today are made mainly of paraffin wax, a product of the mad chemistry boom of the late 19th century, when just about everyone was determined to find something useful in industrial waste like petrolatum or coal tar, or blow up their entire lab trying.

Truthfully, candles can be made out of just about anything that will cling to a wick and burn when exposed to flame. Being made of fats, a popular addition to the mix are scent compounds like essential oils, which release into the air with the smoke when the candle burns. Non-toxic pigments can be used to add color -- when I was a kid, a popular craft activity for older grade-school kids was letting us make taper candles by dipping string into pots of melted crayon. 

I'm an adult now, and I'm allowed to handle actual fire. I don't buy candles often, as the critters and I both have sensitive noses and the scents added to a lot of the decorative ones are overwhelming, but when I do they're mostly tea lights, like the AI-generated rats are gathered 'round. Tea lights are cheap little metal cups of paraffin with a stubby wick in them, and useful for keeping a pot of tea warmish, or heating a small pot of water with potpourri as an alternative to smoky incense.

If you don't plan to burn your candle, but merely leave it on a side table as decoration, you can get some fantastically elaborate ones that are crafted by layering colors in the dipping process, and then carving them while the candle is still warm.


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